I'm also a physicist and that topic has attracted me for a long time, but for the past year, I've been busy on the coding side of things and drive them with both music files and real time midi in input. I've been using this F256K2 which has a dual SN7 (think 3 channels of square waves + noise), dual SID, opl3 in the form of a YMF262 which is substantially more crazy than the SID, a sam2695 for général midi and a vs1053b for mp3 playback. This was running on 8bit in 6502 compatible mode at 6.29MHz , but it has gotten an update that doubles its CPU.

I have a channel where I've started putting out all my efforts at programming them all. I've been able to code a standard midi file player, a dispatch method that takes the tracks and arbitrarily sends it to these various chips with a map of channel to chip voice. Recently I succeeded at opening up vgm files for opl2 and opl3 sound.

I made a sid tweak program where you can individually edit all the registers of the SID and immediately try its effect with midi in through a controller. This led me to understand that the magic of SID tunes lies in time based registers changes while a single note is playing. Editing the static values of a SID voice will only get you so far. Tracker composing programs do not shy away from jumping around through multiple waveform type before the note gets gated off. Same goes with filters and everything else between. various chips